Mir talks about how to work with a resume and LinkedIn profile writer. This is really important because these are your job search tools! Your resume and your LinkedIn profile represent you, they are your face to potential employers. And you can easily get thrown out of the consideration pool for a job if your resume stinks or your LinkedIn profile is lame. Also, Mir pointed out to me earlier that your resume may not even be seen by a human being if it's not optimized to get past applicant tracking system filters.

Working with a resume writer is a great way to ensure that your resume reflects current thinking and trends in hiring. A good resume writer will be a wordsmith, great with language, able to suggest ideas, formatting, action verbs that you might not have thought of.

 If you’re going to invest in a professional to help you with these tools, you want to make the most of your investment by working productively with them. And Mir is going to tell us exactly how to do that.

Career transitions can be so incredibly stressful because they often coincide with other life transitions--job loss, a layoff, a relocation, a divorce, your last child heading off to kindergarten, and so on. 

Sometimes your confidence isn’t as strong as it could be, and I’ve seen that working with my team to write, revise, and finalize that resume leaves people feeling more prepared to speak about their skills and experiences at the interview, more energized about their prospects, and more confident in general.

I’m a firm believer that every job we ever have leaves us with lessons learned and transferable skills. In college, I waited tables at an Italian restaurant and had one of my best managers ever teach me about the importance of ensuring positive customer experience. 

99% of the time, the job seekers who hire my team trust the process and our guidance, and understand how important their input is. In order to create a document that is accurate, persuasive, tailored for the intended audience, and is something that the client is not only excited about, but the client also has to rely on us and we have to rely on the client. It really must be collaborative.

Every now and then, though, we have clients who fall into either one of two camps, and they are on the two extremes of the same spectrum. 

Sometimes we have a client who does not want to be involved at all in the process of writing, revising, and finalizing their documents. Of course, we need to pick your brain, ask you questions, incorporate your answers, and make sure that everything we’ve included in your resume is 100% accurate--from your various jobs’ start and end dates all the way down to how many direct reports you have, what size budgets you manage, and what kinds of outcomes you’ve achieved. 

We can’t write a resume in a vacuum, so I would say one pitfall to look out for when deciding to hire a writer is thinking that this is something you can simply outsource without having to provide any input along the way.

On the other end of the spectrum, we sometimes have a client that doesn’t trust the process and, therefore, doesn’t benefit from all that we can bring to their project. In these instances, the “quote-unquote” “finished resume” often looks a lot like the resume that the client had to start with. That’s because any ideas or suggestions we offered weren’t embraced--or were only adopted in part. In my mind, in these instances, I always wonder, “why did you even hire a writer if you just wanted to write your resume yourself?” So that’s another pitfall to look out for.

What could potentially happen if a job-seeker doesn’t do this the right way?

Well, you’re just not getting the full benefit of the service you’re paying for. Personally, if I’m going to spend money on something, I want to know that I’m getting a great value for the money I’ve spent.

If you can, as a client, come to the table with a truly collaborative spirit, the finished resume and LinkedIn profile will be stronger. After all, you are the subject matter expert in your career, in your industry, in the tools you use, and regarding your career goals. You have to bring that background to the project. 

The expertise that my team and I bring to the project is in knowing the current trends in resume design, understanding how applicant tracking systems work, knowing what hiring managers look for in a resume, experience writing resumes for other professionals in your field, and strong writing, editing, and proofreading skills.

Let’s dig in. What would you say is the first step to working productively with a resume and linkedin profile writer?

 

1. Choose the right resume and LinkedIn profile writer for you.

Ask about who will actually be writing your resume, how much input you will have, how many revisions are allowed, and whether there are any hidden fees (for additional revisions, etc.).

Ask if you can see samples of the writer’s work (both resumes and LinkedIn profiles), read online reviews of the writer/company on sites like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yelp.

Ask about certifications they have and whether they attend their industry's annual professional development conference(s).

Compare prices, compare processes and what/how you'll be asked to provide information (online form vs. phone intake vs. face to face). It’s also a good idea to ask about the writer's experience working with professionals in your field. My company writes resumes for all levels of professionals across all industries, but some writers have a specialty--like military-to-civilian, or IT, or recent grads.

Lastly, you should also have good rapport with the writer, and genuinely feel that he/she is invested in you as an individual job seeker (i.e., you're not just another resume). 

To circle back to something I mentioned earlier in the podcast when we write a resume or a LinkedIn profile for a client, we know that we are helping that person move their career forward. It’s a great privilege to partner in this way with someone. Our clients can feel it, too, because we get tons of thank you emails that tell us just how much they appreciated our dedication. In fact, every Friday on my Facebook and LinkedIn feeds, I post an excerpt from my favorite “thank you email of the week.” These are real notes from real clients in real time, and it gives you a sense of the kinds of relationships we develop with our clients. It’s fun to scroll back through our Facebook feed and see all those client comments.

 

2. Try to keep an open mind about your writer's ideas and suggestions. After all, you hired this person for their expertise in a resume and LinkedIn profile writer.

I touched on this a little bit earlier, but it’s worth repeating here because it IS so important. 

People hire writers because they don't want (or have the time) to write their job search documents, they feel overwhelmed, they lack objectivity about their skills and abilities, they're not sure which of their skills are most transferable and/or they’re not sure how to highlight their most transferable skills. They also don't understand how to play the ATS game; we’ve seen that this is a major source of anxiety for our clients. Lastly, some people just aren't confident in their writing skills--and they know that the resume has to be written flawlessly.

Your writer should give you good ideas and suggestions about how to reposition or rebrand yourself, how to keyword-optimize your resume, how to make your document look more on-trend with respect to layout and design, and especially, how to revise the content so that it aligns with your target jobs.

In my experience, I have seen that it can be hard for some clients to “let go” of work they are proud of, or projects that they worked really hard on, things that they received recognition for, and so forth. Sometimes, though, in order to create a logical career narrative, we may ask a client to cut content--and the client struggles with that. 

In working with relaunchers--people who’ve taken a career break for one reason or another and are looking to get back into the workforce--I’ve seen how common it is for them to downplay what they’ve done in their communities, for their children’s schools, for their homeowners’ associations, for their churches, and so forth. With a relauncher resume, our goal is always to use volunteer work experience in lieu of “for-pay” work experience to highlight all the valuable and transferable skills the person has to offer her next employer. 

So, to summarize, keep an open mind about the suggestions your writer makes, since your writer is trying to push the envelope on your behalf. For people who find it hard to talk about themselves or “brag” about their accomplishments, this is even more important. 

 

3. Remember that you're the expert in your field, your goals, and your career path. Your writer should ask for and welcome your feedback and edits.

So, we write a resume on three levels: 1. visuals (things like look-and-feel, organizational structure, fonts, and formatting), 2. content (things like spelling, grammar, punctuation, and parallelism), and 3. persuasive argument (knowing who your audience is, what they’re looking for, and how to reverse-engineer your work history and present your skills and qualifications in a way that appeals to that audience).

Lastly, when it comes to that persuasive argument, your writer should prompt you about the skills and experiences that you may (or may not) have. If there are gaps in your experience, your writer should ask you about those. In our case, when we are working with a client, we look at job ads we asked the client to provide, as well as using our experience writing resumes for other clients in similar roles to prompt that client to tell us more about his or her experience. 

Let’s review the 3 steps shared with us:

 

1. Choose the right resume and LinkedIn profile writer for you.

 

2. Try to keep an open mind about your writer's ideas and suggestions. After all, you hired this person for their expertise in resume and LinkedIn profile writing.

 

3. Remember that you're the expert in your field, your goals, and your career path. Your writer should ask for and welcome your feedback and edits.

If you need a professional to help with your job search tools, here’s how you can reach Mir:

info@jobmarketsolutions.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/mir-garvy/

You can also see Mir in action at the Back to Business Women’s Conference in Research Triangle Park, NC on February 21 where she’ll be speaking specifically about how to write your resume if you’ve got a gap in your career because you took time off. 

Now that you know how to work with a resume and Linkedin profile writer, go do it! I believe in you.